Friday, October 20, 2017

Freecell Solver version 4.14.1,
has been released. It is available in
the form of a source archive, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source library
and some command line applications, for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

There have been several intermediate releases since the last release that was
announced on this news feed and you are well advised to upgrade.
More
information on the changes can be found in the NEWS.txt / NEWS.html.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Freecell Solver version 4.4.0,
has been released. It is available in
the form of a source archive, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source library
and some command line applications, for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This release is dedicated to the memory of Christina Grimmie
( Wikipedia Page ;
YouTube account ), a
musician and singer whom I was
fond of and who was killed on 10 June 2016. The name of the new scan
“one-big-family” was inspired by the name of
this video of hers.
Some others of my favourite videos by Grimmie:

The new release features the new scan, fixes several bugs,
and incorporates many code cleanups, refactorings and optimisations. More
information can be found in the NEWS.txt / NEWS.html. It also
adds the transpose-freecell-board.py program (thanks to Manish for the idea)
and removes some old board generation programs that are no longer relevant.

Friday, March 25, 2016

Freecell Solver version 4.2.0,
has been released. It is available in
the form of a source archive, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source library
and some command line applications, for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This release sports the new configuration theme “-l conspiracy-theory”
(or “-l ct”) which is somewhat faster than the best contender up to it,
“-l amateur-star”, some relatively minor bug fixes, new compile-time
options, and many small and somewhat larger code cleanups, refactorings, and
optimisations.

“conspiracy-theory” is a reference to the Jewish holiday of
Purim, which took place
around the time of its release and an
old post of mine
about it.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Freecell Solver version 4.0.0,
has been released. It is available in
the form of a source archive, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source library
and some command line applications, for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This release sports the integration of the scans of Tom Holroyd’s patsolve
for improved atomic moves-based solving, some other new flags with bug fixes,
a transition of the Python code to Python 3, and some other changes that are
mentioned in
the NEWS
file.

The most significant digit was increased due to the integration of patsolve.
Enjoy!

Monday, May 19, 2014

Freecell Solver version 3.26.0,
has been released. It is available in
the form of a source archive, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source library
and some command line applications, for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This release features some fixes for crashes on malformed input, as
reported by the Mayhem team to the Debian bug tracker
(thanks!), fixes for newer versions of the GCC compiler, CMake and
Games::Solitaire::Verify, and some other changes that are mentioned in
the NEWS
file.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Freecell Solver version 3.24.0,
has been released. Freecell Solver 3.24.0 is available in
the form of a source archive, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source framework (library
and some command line applications), for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This release is dedicated to the memory of
Adrian Ettlinger
who passed away on
23 October 2013, who was a good Internet friend of the primary maintainer of
Freecell Solver (= Shlomi Fish), and who contributed a great deal to Freecell
Solver and to Freecell research and programming in general (among other major
life achievements, and contributions to man kind). You can read
an obituary of Mr. Ettlinger by Shlomi Fish as it was
posted to the Freecell Solver Discussions mailing list, and also read
an
an
interview that Fish conducted with him back in 2003.

The new video-editing preset was named in honor of Ettlinger’s
previous work in pioneering non-linear video editing back when he worked as
an Electrical Engineer (and later as a software developer) for
CBS corporation.

In any case, the main highlights of this release are:

New Feature: the -l video-editing (or -l ve
for short) flare-based preset that tends to yield shorter solutions on average.
See a post with some performance analysis.

A bug was fixed when providing input without a trailing newline character
(“\n”). This was reported against the online JavaScript version was Olaf and
was fixed globally. Thanks, Olaf!

The distribution now contains the sources for the Split FCC (= Fully
Connected Component) Solver which was an unsuccessful attempt to
solve Windows Freecell deal No. 384,243 with two freecells. It may prove
of general utility in the future, though.

Hope you enjoy this release and we extend our sadness to the other family
members and friends of the late Mr. Ettlinger.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Freecell Solver version 3.22.0,
has been released. Freecell Solver 3.22.0 is available in
the form of a source archive, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source framework (library
and some command line applications), for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

The highlights of this version are some bug fixes: the Win32 NSIS (= Nullsoft
Installer) package should now build, run and process the presets (e.g:
-l as properly). Furthermore, there's a bug fix to the command line
flags processing, where flags whose prefixes are known flags were erroneously
recognised as such (e.g: --resetjunk vs. --reset).

On the new features side, the
JavaScript-based solver
now accepts arbitrary fc-solve command line options, so it can be used to
solve any of the supported variants of Solitaire, as well as support most other
fc-solve features.